


Age Is All In Your Mind

by Wolfling



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-26
Updated: 2010-02-26
Packaged: 2017-10-07 13:46:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/65712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wolfling/pseuds/Wolfling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes the inside doesn't match the outside</p>
            </blockquote>





	Age Is All In Your Mind

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the SPN 30 shots nano table. Prompt: time
> 
> Spoilers up to 5.07

Time's a funny thing.

Not funny ha ha though it can be that too, especially when there are angels around to quantum leap you into their idea of a punchline.

But funny strange. It's the whole relative thing – how minutes and hours and days seem shorter the more you've experienced. How time seems to stretch when you're waiting for something bad to stop, and how it seems to go on fastforward when it's something good. How there's such a thing as dog years.

And Hell years.

Hell's what got me started thinking about time in the first place -- I mean beyond how long until dinner and I have to get up _when_? thoughts. Having only a year to live with a definite expiry date makes you hypersensitive of the seconds ticking down. When it was happening, and even now when I look back, that year seemed to fly by, being shorter than any other year I experienced living or dead.

And then came Hell, where time really was different. Forty years in four months and I swear those forty years lasted longer than any other forty years that every passed. It was a hard thing to leave behind, when I got yanked from Perdition and tried to fit back into my normal life -- if you can call trying to stop the Apocalypse normal.

Every minute that went by got compared to my time in Hell, it was a constant background noise, a weight of years trying to crush me flat as a pancake. I got why old people sometimes get tired and just want to stop. It can be damned hard hauling the weight of all those extra years around. It does things to you. Underneath this devilishly handsome exterior, there's a cranky old guy trying to get out.

Which is why this whole thing with the poker chips and the premature qualifying for senior citizen discounts has been so weird. I mean, all the aches and pains sucked, as did not being able to eat what I want and getting winded after one flight of stairs. And don't get me started on the heart attack because I am so over that shit.

But in some ways, the whole thing felt, I don't know, comfortable somehow. The whole being an old man mindset was easy to slip into, with the crankiness, the impatience, and, I don't know, the wisdom? The urge to spout off patronizing tidbits of advice anyway.

I heard myself saying, "Sammy when you get to be our age," just like I was a creaky old grandfather telling the young whippersnappers how life goes. Sam was probably right to cut me off because dude, was I being pretentious much or what?

But my reaction to what he said crystallized some things for me, and sent me off on this whole time is strange train of thought. I think I get some things consciously that I hadn't before. Because time is not only strange, it's fucked up.

"Sammy when you get to be our age-"

"You're thirty, Dean!"

_No, I'm really not._


End file.
